


Something Wick(ed) This Way Comes

by asuralucier



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Fortune Favors the Bold is now a pun, Grifter!Marcus, Hustler!John, Internalized Homophobia and some slurs, Let's go to Denny's, Los Angeles, M/M, Morality Pet!Mike Waters, My Own Private Idaho fusion sort of, Neither Marcus nor John will admit to anything so emotional constipation up the wazoo, Nineties vibe, They still have sex and at some point Marcus forgets to pay, ambiguous ending, fathers and sons, past abuse and trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-06-28 00:45:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19801201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier
Summary: ”My dad’s the Mayor of Portland,” John says after he swallows. “He’s also very rich. You off him for me, I’ll give you half of whatever.”The majority of Marcus’s brain is still somewhere else, floating mostly near the tip of his wet cock and in John’s mouth. He says, “What?”Or: Marcus, a small time crook going nowhere, meets a very pretty hustler who owns an expensive watch, knows big words, and is possibly crazy.But what a ride.





	1. Fortune Favors the Bold

**Author's Note:**

> Some context: someone sent me [this](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/RN8BTA/willem-dafoe-to-live-and-die-in-la-1985-RN8BTA.jpg) of 30-year-old Willem Dafoe and uh, this happened. Also have [this](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/styles/event_image_detail_default/public/screen_shot_2016-07-01_at_2.06.24_pm.png?itok=aQph4JBY) of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves from _My Own Private Idaho_. You do not have to have seen MOPI for this to make sense but it is a great film. 
> 
> This is complete but I am getting my smut checked so it might be a couple of days. Also, how has anyone not used this title yet?

At first, Marcus thinks he’s made a mistake. 

By streetlight, dim and unassuming, the boy looks like another street ruffian, dirty and willing on the corner of Santa Monica opposite one of those clubs, glitzy and queer, that Marcus would never be caught dead going into. As the boy approaches him, a confident stride, with no hint of desperation dragging down his footsteps, Marcus is struck by how he clean he looks. How he still has all of his teeth. 

“What’s up?” 

Nobody leers like that to a potential trick. The thing about johns is that they’d like to feel in control. Sometimes money is the only thing they have that’s going right and even that’s not a sure thing. A twist of the mouth might shatter that illusion in its entirety, and Marcus is no stranger to illusions or delusions. So either this kid is extremely stupid, or just...skating by on the virtue of his mouth. That mouth does look like it could do a lot, with the right persuasion. 

“Open your mouth.” 

The kid does, running his tongue invitingly across his front teeth. 

“You’ll do,” Marcus says. He leans over and unlocks the door to the passenger’s side. “Get in.” 

“I have a friend,” the kid says. “If you wanna have some fun.” 

Marcus considers this. Another old trick. Any idiot john might think this was his lucky day. To Marcus, it means he’s about to get rolled for everything he’s got. 

“I want to see him first.” 

“Fine,” the kid leans away from the window and whistles. “Oi. Mike!” 

“Mike” turns out to be nothing like the kid. Which was both a good and bad thing. Mike is blond, skinny, underfed and _starving_ whereas the kid almost looks like a well-kept pig when they stand next to each other; he’s certainly rosy where Mike’s just a ghost. Looking at Mike looking at the kid makes Marcus’s stomach churn funny. 

Marcus has Mike open up his mouth too and notes that his gums are graying. Mike seems to have had a rough time of it, unlike the kid. 

“No can do,” Marcus says. “Just you, kid. Sorry, Mike.” 

“Hey, come on.” 

For a moment, Marcus nearly loses his resolve. Of course he knows what it’s like, to be starving. He’s here now, maybe because he is still starving. 

“ ‘S okay, John.” Mike says. The way he hitches himself up again after a second or two says to Marcus that he’s used to this. “John” is prettier, cleaner. 

Marcus gets out his billfold and checks the state of things. He plucks a twenty from his wallet and shoves it at Mike. “Would you suck me for this much?” 

Mike says, “I’d suck you for less,” and somehow that makes Marcus want to cry. 

“Take that and buy yourself a milkshake. I won’t keep him long.” 

“Just to be clear,” says John. “I wouldn’t suck you for that much.” 

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Marcus says. He has no idea why he knows this. Call it instinct. Grifter’s instinct: never take more than you can stand to carry, but also never more than the mark can stand to lose because you might want to come back later for a second picking. 

“I’m just saying, be sure you can afford me,” John grins. “If you turn up here.” 

Marcus obeys, not because he takes any stock in John’s advice, but because he independently knows that dead end alley to be fine. John’s not the only one who has been around. In fact, Marcus might have been here last week with yet another face and another mouth he no longer remembers. The act itself is not so important as the safety he is assured while the act occurs. 

He parks, and John holds out his hand. “You pay first.” 

“Not how this works,” Marcus says. “Especially if you’re claiming to be a little prince about it. “You should be more like your pal Mike.” 

“But Mike’s not here,” John reminds him, smugness everywhere until Marcus imagines that he is oozing with it, out of the pores of his skin. “You wanted me, and you can have me, as long as you pay up.” 

Marcus looks at him up and down again. He wonders if anyone has ever to disavow John of the notion of bargaining when the kid clearly has no chips in hand except a girly face. A face can leave a person’s possession for so many reasons. 

“And that works, does it?” 

John rubs an almost protective hand over his jaw. “Often enough. Give me your hands.” 

Marcus hesitates, then he does another onceover of the kid’s person, not in the carnal sort of way, because that was coming once he _paid_ for it, but more like for the ugly reality of what it meant for someone like John, a pretty hustler, to carry something sharp. Not necessarily a knife, just a fighting chance. 

He finally gives up. “You carrying?” 

“Carrying what, condoms?” 

Marcus hadn’t thought of that, and then was slightly worried for the state of his sexual health. “Does Mike carry condoms?” 

John says, fixing him with a narrow look, “You sure you don’t want to fuck with Mikey instead. We can drive back.” 

“He’s probably deep in with his milkshake,” Marcus says. 

“You really think he went off to buy a milkshake,” John rolls his eyes. 

“Or he can buy himself some nice crystal, I don’t really care. Take off your clothes.” 

John’s eyes dart around. The kid’s got good instincts; Marcus will give him that. Where his mouth might run him into trouble, his eyes might get him out. “All of my clothes?” 

“All of your clothes.” 

Marcus keeps his eyes forward and his hands on the wheel as John shifts back his seat to give himself more room. First, he removes his watch, which Marcus hadn’t really lumped in the watch with the rest of “clothes” but this is interesting. The watch hangs heavy on John’s thin wrist, as if it doesn’t belong to him. 

“Where’d you get that?” 

“It was my dad’s,” John says. 

Marcus has an old man too. Difference is, he doesn’t think his old man owns anything more expensive than a bottle of Jack’s. The only thing Marcus has ever taken away from his father is a stress fracture or two or three at his elbow. Tucked away in his bones in case he ever forgot. 

“Oh.” 

John shoves the watch in the pocket of his jeans and starts with his shirt, a tee with faded lettering. Up over his head it goes, and it’s as if nobody has ever been on that body. The skin smooth, not pocked from circumstance, and the ink that stains across his shoulder blades is a pro job. Not prison ink. _Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat_.

“You even looking at me?” 

Marcus feels himself wanting to smirk. It happens from time to time, when a con is going his way without his even doing anything. He hadn’t pegged the kid as needy, but maybe if he hangs around with the likes of Mike, obviously he’s going to pick up some bad habits. “What does your ink say? Fortune something.” 

“ _Fortis fortuna adiuvat_ ,” John supplies. The words sound odd on his tongue, as if he’s reaching for something. Something long lost and far away. “It means, fortune favors the bold.” 

“Amen,” Marcus says. Now, that’s a god he can get behind. 

John looks impossibly young without his clothes on. But the line of his spine is stiff with knowledge. He knows exactly what he is giving away. And unless he has a shiv shoved up where the sun don’t shine then Marcus is satisfied that the kid isn’t carrying. 

John’s jeans and shorts are crumpled around his ankles and his t-shirt is thrown over the back of the headrest. His dick is waking up, a nice lazy flushed red. 

“Hands,” Marcus takes his hands off the wheel and proffers them. 

John, Marcus decides, is not your usual hustler. Hustlers don’t have this sort of time, accounted for by their fathers’ watches. John takes his hands, presses his thumb into Marcus’s palm and then brings just his left hand to his mouth. He parts his lips and wraps around two of Marcus’s fingers, his forefinger and his middle finger, and just brushes his tongue over Marcus’s fingernails. 

The wetness goes. It dips its way into Marcus’s system, past his defenses, past the shadows of those who have come before and rests, tellingly at the base of his cock. The breath Marcus lets out probably gives away too much already. Heady, heavy. 

John lets go of him. “Pay me.” 

“How much?” 

“Sixty,” John says. 

“Forty,” Marcus counters because that way he can get some of the blood that’s floating towards his erection to flow back to his brain. Which kind of defeats the purpose of this whole thing, but something is telling Marcus to be careful and he hasn’t lasted this long to at least think on some level that his gut is magic. 

“Fifty,” John says. “Or I’m getting dressed. Your call, man.” 

Expensive and prissy. Despite himself, Marcus’s interest is piqued and he gets out his wallet again. He’d started this whole venture in a bid to celebrate a con well pulled. Fifty leaves him nearly dry. 

“Here,” Marcus holds out the cash. Some of the bills now have John’s saliva on them. 

“Thank you for your _patronage_ ,” John says. Patronage is one of those ten dollar words, not usually found on the tongue of a hustler patrolling the curbs of Santa Monica Boulevard. 

John’s fingers reach for him after that, after stuffing the cash in the same pocket as his father’s watch. 

The kid can blow. This is surprising, and then it isn’t. You don’t get off being expensive unless you can back it up. Maybe. 

He’s not got any street words in his mouth or any street manners but Marcus is at the very least be impressed by the street versatility of John’s tongue, the way it worms along the vein, slow and filthy and when Marcus bucks up his hips without warning, John’s only reaction is to grip Marcus around the balls and make a gagging sound in his throat. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Marcus moans, deep and wanting. It would probably be embarrassing if he hadn’t paid for it, a lot to have a grand old time. He feels the whole of himself come alive, twitching and straining for more of the dark endlessness of John’s mouth. “Fuck, John. Fuck.” 

His orgasm hits without much of the usual buildup. Which is kind of surprising, and then it isn’t really. It’s because Marcus does this not to think, and sometimes all he can think about is how it should just be over. But then, all he can think of now, is the kid’s too expensive watch, how the kid works his tongue around word and skin and. 

And then he is coming, coming with a bit of a strained yell, in the generous swallow of John’s throat and all right. Maybe the kid is worth fifty. 

John is looking at him, with his mouth still full. 

Marcus comes back to himself and says, “Get off.” 

John does, unfolding himself from over the console like some sort of compact ivory statue, the kind you see in museums. He’s hard, and Marcus nearly wants to touch him. He busies his hands, tucking himself back in his pants and feeling the wetness of John’s mouth stick against the fabric of his shorts. Then he puts his hands on the wheel.

“Get dressed.” 

John opens his mouth and closes it again. He does, pulling his pants up from his ankles. After that, it’s the shirt, covering that perfectly smooth torso and now Marcus is looking.

John knows he is, too. They look at each other, and Marcus suddenly gets a weird feeling, a queer feeling at the back of his head. 

“Let’s get you back to Mike,” Marcus says. His voice is scratched but it mostly works. 

Marcus hustles too. Most of the time, for small change; sometimes he gets a big job and works with a few guys he knows from around, but that’s not too often. He sticks to a certain sort of women who look at him and think that he could be somebody else. He goes into their houses and swipes things that they don’t really miss. Some jewelry, some pointless memento. When he is not doing that he cruises and sleeps in his car. 

It’s not much, just enough and the fifty he gives John does hurt. Marcus tells himself this is why it’s hard to put the kid out of mind. You always remember things that hurt. 

Marcus doesn’t know what possessed him to drive back there to stare at the coming and goings of the club. He must have been staring for quite a long time without thinking because then there’s a loud rapping sound on his windshield. 

“Looking for me?” John says. 

Marcus takes him in. Clean again. A different shirt. Even a different jacket. The watch is loose on his wrist and John fiddles with it while he waits for an answer. 

“I could be,” Marcus says, rolling down the window. “Or I could be looking for Mike.” 

“Mikey’s got picked up,” John leans forward into the car. “We can kill some time together.” 

This feels like a con. It is a con. Marcus pulls a version of this sometimes and he is good at watching for a tell, a giveaway of whether something’s took. Watching a mark dip a toe in because what’s on offer (a nice tight mouth or a nice pink pucker elsewhere) is tempting. You also know it’s bad for you, but that’s exactly why it is, tempting. 

Marcus reaches to unlock the door again and John gets in without another word. 

In the dead-end alley, John takes off his old man’s watch. He undresses, this time without being asked, and Marcus watches him in his peripheral vision. 

_Fortis Fortuna Adivuat_ comes alive as John bends his neck. This time, John doesn’t ask for fifty up front and Marcus doesn’t offer because he’s not a schmuck. But the kid sucks him slow, the way that he’s been thinking about for days and then the wetness of his mouth is suddenly too much again and Marcus curses as he comes. 

The kid mostly just looks like he wants to laugh. 

”You wanna know something? My dad’s the Mayor of Portland,” John says after he swallows. “He’s also very rich. You off him for me, I’ll give you half of whatever.”

The majority of Marcus’s brain is still somewhere else, floating mostly near the tip of his wet cock and in John’s mouth. He says, “What?”

The idea of offing his old man is an _idea_. It sometimes takes up all the corners of Marcus’s mind when he has nothing better to think about, but then he lets it go. His old man will die eventually, because that’s what people on the inside do. 

For John, the idea seems to not have gotten there in all its possibility yet. His saying it out loud to Marcus, who he doesn’t know from anything or anybody, except the fact that maybe he’s good for fifty bucks, is proof enough of that. Still, the words sit there in the air, absurd and pretty, and Marcus thinks to himself that he’s never been to Portland. 

“Why not do it yourself?” Marcus says. “Bet he’ll never see you coming.” 

“Because then I won’t inherit,” John says. “I asked Mikey. He said no.” 

“I imagine most people would,” Marcus reaches across the console to brush his fingers by John’s thigh. The skin feels as smooth as it did in his head. 

“But not you,” John peers at him, bright and dark at the same time.

“I haven’t said nothing,” Marcus reminds him. 

He eyes land on John’s erection, still flushed and full. Marcus pressed his thumb against it and John twitches. 

“But you haven’t said no.” John says. 

“Guess I haven’t,” Marcus looks him straight in the eye and he can feel it, the kid thinking through his cock. Which is unusual, but nothing about this is...anything. He takes his thumb away, and John bites his bottom lip. “You’re a crazy kid, you know.” 

“Only the good kind of crazy,” John smiles, red-lipped and wide like the devil himself. 

Marcus suggests they get something to eat because he is curious. He can treat this like any other job, say no and bail the moment it doesn’t suit him. It doesn’t work out all the time, but it is not as if Marcus can’t improvise. 

They go to a diner and John asks for fries with all the fixings and a large chocolate milkshake. Watching the kid eat is a little bit like watching one of those dirty videos you have to ask for in a hushed voice. Marcus isn’t sure whether or not to go with the flow down south or keep raiding the napkin dispenser. John is obscene. 

To divert his own attention, Marcus sips at his cola and lights a cigarette. He feels John looking and suddenly the cigarette isn’t enough to cover the itch in his mouth. 

“You want one?” 

John wipes white cream from the edge of his mouth. “Yeah.” 

Los Angeles has a smell, a filthy old car sex smell. A smell that seems to cling to every one of Marcus’s inhales, exhales, and even to the rush of nicotine that goes into his lungs. 

“Here.” 

John’s fingers stutter, for just a moment, an honest moment, that tells Marcus that he really is just a kid. A kid who can blow in the big leagues but really, will take the time to tell a trick to kill his old man for half of whatever. Also, Marcus doesn’t believe it for a second that John’s old man is the _Mayor of Portland_. 

But finally, John reaches to take Marcus’s lit cigarette from him, he examines the filter, as if the dampness from Marcus’s spit is infinitely worse than whatever John has already tasted on his cock. Then he takes a drag, and it’s not quite like sucking live skin, a man’s being, but Marcus is enraptured anyway and that is terrible. 

“Portland,” Marcus says. “Fucking _Portland_.” 

John leers at him and Marcus can’t decide if he wants to get hard again or take a piss. “Don’t believe me?” 

“Who the fuck is the Mayor of Portland anyway?” 

“Mayor Jack Favor,” John says. He doesn’t have to think about it, which maybe means he’s not making this up. Or it could mean the exact opposite, that he’s told this little fib so many times it’s become like second nature. A version of truth having strangled the real thing. 

“Which makes you what? John Favor? That where the ink comes from? Fortune _favors_ the bold?” 

“I’m John Wick,” John says. “Took my mother’s name. Jack is short for John, too. So Dad’s John Favor, really.” 

“Why?” 

“I’m an embarrassment,” John gives Marcus’s cigarette one last hard suck before handing it back. “So much of an embarrassment I’m lost in the City of Angels.”


	2. Skin in the Game

John shares a motel room with Mike; “motel” being generous term for the place, a practically infested joint with a bum asleep standing up sideways right next to the door. They don’t live there all the time, but when they can manage. Neither of them appear to have wheels, so Marcus wonders, out of pure curiosity and nothing else, what they do when they don’t manage. 

The room is on the first floor, which means that Marcus can park directly in front of the room itself, and a light comes on. In the light, he spies a jealous skulking shadow. 

“So he waits up for you.” Marcus says, eyes only incidentally on the veiled figure. For some reason, he is keenly aware that Mike is staring right back at him through the cheap gauzy curtains. “But he won’t off your old man for you.” 

“Mikey doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. Plus, he’s a fag.” John unbuckles his seatbelt and arches forward. Something in his back pops, and Marcus closes his eyes. He imagines a bone, milky creamy white, and cruel protruding from John’s perfect skin and then. Then he shakes himself. 

“And you’re not?” 

“I only have to do this for a little while longer,” John shrugs. “And you owe me fifty bucks.” He extends a hand. 

Marcus weighs his billfold in hand. “And if I kill your old man?” 

“Then you’d get a return on your investment,” John says, sounding like a bank manager. Actually, that is a bit of a lie. Marcus doesn’t know what a bank manager sounds like. All men sound the same when they’ve got a barrel of a shotgun stuck down their throats. They don’t say much; they mostly just gag.

Marcus hands over fifty bucks again. This time, it hurts less. He’s got a few things lined up. Things to look forward to and fill his time. 

But this is probably what old hands call a big score. Do this, and you’d never have to work again. So Marcus has got plenty to think about. “Give me your watch.” 

John immediately tucks both of his hands under himself. “Why?” 

Marcus says, “I wanna think about it. By thinking about it, I’ve already got skin in the game. In for a penny, in for a pound. You have to give something too. I want the watch.” 

“You have to promise not to sell it,” John says. 

“I can do what I like with it,” Marcus returns and holds his gaze. “I might sell it; I might not.” 

John seems to shrink in the passenger’s seat. More weasel than wolf or man. “Please don’t sell it.” 

“Okay,” Marcus says, because a placeholder that might well become something else wasn’t anything. He holds out his hand and John stares at him balefully for a long moment before he moving to slip the watch off his wrist. 

The metal is still a touch warm from John’s skin. 

“Now get out.” Marcus says. He puts the watch on the dash, face up. He still might sell it, but being otherwise careless with it is pointless and might even undermine its value. “You don’t want to keep Moonface waiting, over there.” 

John smiles sourly. “Hey, give me some skin too, yeah?” 

Marcus glances up at him. “I’ve got skin.” 

“I don’t even know your name.” 

“It’s Marcus,” Marcus says. 

“Right,” John leans away from the window. “Don’t sell my watch, Marcus.” 

“I do what I like,” Marcus shrugs. “Be seeing you, John.” 

The world sucks enough that just to get around in the world without wanting to kill yourself, a man is in desperate need of an addiction. Anything to get a poor bastard through his day because he needs it. 

As far as addictions go, Marcus’s are not so bad. Of course he has to think that. A pack of smokes every couple of days. The thrill of the chase, other people’s mouths, but never more than that. He hates needles, and he has a real thing about things not going up his nose because he breathes in enough crap already. And the argument could be made that Marcus is obsessed with his ride, but what man isn’t. In Los Angeles, reliable wheels is like a pair of legs. 

“You want an out of state one? Or an in state one?” Aurelio says. “Gotta few in from Oregon, Arizona…” 

“Here’s good,” Marcus says. “Ever been to Portland?” 

Aurelio peers at him. One moment curious, the next moment not. Somebody asking if he's been to Portland doesn't even ping on the crazy scale. “Nope. Nice bling.” 

Marcus touches John’s watch on his wrist. It fits him better, like it belongs there. “Thanks.” 

Marcus’s preferred cash and carry is on the corner of one of those streets, where West Hollywood starts to get a bit sleazy so he feels comfortable. Still, the proprietor of W. Continental talks like he’s the King of England and dresses like he owns one of them big studios in Hollywood proper. Marcus has never seen the man without a tie or a pocket square and sometimes thinks about choking him with both of those things. 

“How much is this worth?” 

Winston, gray-streaked but ageless, looks at Marcus over the top of his crossword. “Where’d you get that?” 

“I didn’t steal it,” Marcus says. “But you know, I never steal anything.” 

Winston looks down at the watch on the glass counter between them. He finally puts down his pen and gives his glasses a good wipe with a cloth he takes out from inside of his jacket. Then he picks up the watch and turns it over in his hands. 

“J. S. F.,” Winston muses, reading the three letters engraved on the back of the watch. “That’s not you.” 

“No.” 

“A watch of this caliber, people will come looking for it.” 

“I didn’t say I wanted to hawk it to you. I just want to know how much it was worth.” 

“And you want that free, do you?” 

Nothing comes for free. Marcus isn’t stupid. “My schedule’s clear enough. If you want me to do something, I’ll do it.” 

“This watch is dear, you know. Probably several thousands’ worth. Enough to entice someone to kill a man, I’d imagine.” 

“I’m enticed,” Marcus says. He tastes the word, well worth ten dollars or fifty, like it’s somebody else’s spit on his cock. 

Winston gives him an address in Burbank and a gun. 

Out of a sense of paranoia, well-honed by the fact that criminals (especially small-time crooks) don’t have any business liking each other, Marcus checks that the serial has been properly filed twice to make sure that Winston just wants him for a job and not to jam him up. He does a quick perimeter around the block and then goes into the house before he loses his nerve. 

The fact that Marcus still loses his nerve is funny sometimes. It’s probably because he thinks too much. He wonders if it will be the same, emptying a clip into Mayor John Favor’s head. John Favor, Mayor of Portland. 

If only half of whatever would still the churning in his head. Making Marcus regular, dull, but most importantly, rich. 

Or maybe John, just a kid, would want to do something symbolic and crazy like wanting the back of his old man’s head done in with a shiny golf club. The way Marcus dreams about smashing in a bottle of Jack’s but then, he’d lost his nerve then, too. It’s probably different when you haven’t come out of a man’s dick. Technically, you come of your mother’s pussy, but without a dick, things go nowhere. 

He drives back to Winston with his knuckles bloody and the bullets in the gun spent. On a second thought, Marcus gets rid of the gun when he spots a garbage truck rolling by and maybe Favor is a god, after all. 

Winston does him a once over that makes Marcus want to shrivel but he pushes the watch back across the glass counter. 

“I’m going to be rich,” Marcus tells him. He slips the watch back, careful to click it into place and not to get blood on it. 

“Rich,” Winston tastes the word, and suddenly the reality of it seems so far away to Marcus again that he has to cling to the coolness of the metal on his wrist. 

“You want to win the lottery, Marcus, you have to make enough to buy a ticket.” 

“I got a ticket,” Marcus presses his thumb to the watch face, leaving a clean print. “I got a golden fucking ticket.” 

He circles around Santa Monica twice and tells himself that he isn’t looking for John. So it doesn’t matter that Marcus doesn’t find the kid. 

He does, however, find Mike. 

“Hey, kid.” 

For a minute, he thinks to himself that the kid might be dead. That Mike has died next to a dumpster. Marcus idles the car and waves a hand in front of Mike’s nose and feels at the tip of fingers, labored warm air. 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” 

Marcus straightens and turns to find John adjusting himself. Mostly, the buckle of his jeans. 

“Found him like this,” Marcus says. “Where were you?” 

“Around,” John shrugs. “He does this sometimes. Just faints.” He kneels now, and touches a hand to his friend’s face. The gesture surprisingly gentle, and Marcus has to think now, whether or not John thinks that it means anything, to be kind to a fag who doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. Kind of like looking after a puppy. 

“Hey, Mikey. Hey.” 

“...John?” 

“You were gone again,” John takes his hand away, as soon as Mike moves to lean forward into the touch. He jerks a thumb in Marcus’s direction. Marcus, who is suddenly weirdly busy dealing with a lump in his throat. “He found you.” 

Mike regards him with eyes not all there. “Do you want to buy me another milkshake?” 

“Yeah,” Marcus says, even though he totally means to say no. “Yeah kid, I can buy you a milkshake.” 

Marcus takes them to Denny’s, because hell, he’s been wanting Denny’s; it’s cheap and reliable and Marcus lives for their endless coffee refills. It’s late enough that the waitress gives them the sort of look that means she’s remembering what they look like, in case they’re up to no good. 

“Enjoying that?” John taps his father’s watch on Marcus’s wrist. Even though there’s just metal and his neat fingernail scrapes glass, right over where Marcus had pressed in his thumb, Marcus feels that patronizing touch all over his body. 

“Chicks dig it,” Marcus shrugs. “They all tell me I got nice bling.” 

Mike has his mouth wrapped around a straw like he’s doing something else. He blew a little unhappily into the pink strawberry depths of his milkshake and then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Isn’t that your dad’s, John?” 

“Yeah,” John says, popping a fry into his mouth. 

Mike regards Marcus again with his brown puppy-pupils wide and dark. He looks like he wants to say something, but then doesn’t, in the end. 

Marcus throws back his coffee in one long swallow and decides that even if he doesn’t have to piss immediately, a moment probably wouldn’t go amiss. He stands, and knocks the table with his knuckles still scarred. John notices, and Mike’s still staring at Mayor Jack Favor’s watch. 

And then his wrist burns, it burns and burns as if somebody else wants to take over his blood. 

Marcus stands in the one stall, where somebody has clogged the damn toilet and it stinks. He doesn’t mind that so much, Sometimes it helps, to always remember that you’re always nearly in a world of shit. 

Then the door to the men’s opens and Marcus stands still. He even holds his breath. 

“It stinks in here,” John says. “You snorting?” 

“Well, it’s not me.” Marcus steps out from the stall and out of habit, looks for a spot of clean. Doesn’t find one. “And no.” 

“This what you want?” 

John steps up to him, impossibly long-shadowed and spindly. He presses the metal of the watch so tight against Marcus’s wrist it’s actually starting to hurt. 

“It could be,” Marcus shrugs. “Would you like to know whether or not I’ve thought about it?” 

John’s breath smells like fries. “Have you thought about it?” 

“I don’t even know if your old man’s actually the Mayor of Portland.” Come to think of it, that is something he could have asked Winston, who professes to know all sorts of things. But then he hadn’t, because the ticket was his. If Marcus is honest, he has no clue why somebody like Winston is still wallowing at a cash and carry. Maybe the man doesn’t need anything as much as he does like it. 

Which makes him a whole new brand of pervert. 

“You’ve got my watch,” John says. “It’s got his initials. J. S. F.” 

“What’s ‘S’?” 

“Scott,” John says. “But he hates it. Can I have my watch back now?” 

“Don’t think so,” Marcus says. “I’m growing attached to it.” In fact, he thinks that it is such a shame, that it’s been a busy few days that he hasn’t had the chance to give the watch its due. “Sides. Still thinking.” 

“Think faster,” John scowls. 

A body breathes. Not only through the mouth or the nose. Marcus puts a hand over John’s ass, enough to grab, but not too much, and feels the boy’s breathing go thin. “Maybe if you drop some more skin in the game.” 

“Like what?” John looks at Marcus’s hand, and then back up. 

Marcus is conscious that pressing the kid to turn a trick in the godforsaken toilets of Denny’s is possibly not the greatest idea. But it’s no more crazy than, _hey, I sucked you, wanna kill the Mayor of Portland?_

Besides, John is too clean. It loathes Marcus to get the kid dirty, in a weird sort of way. Everything out of his mouth is like a pretty little idea, from out of this world. Far away from the recent mess Marcus has left in Burbank and certainly far out from here. 

“Already told you I’m not,” John starts. 

“And do you think I am?” Marcus looks at him steady. He feels it, John’s bones thinking. 

John tries to shrug, but only manages it halfway. Then he says, a bit faintly and boyish and not himself. “It’s extra if you want it up the ass.” 

“Course it is,” Marcus says. “I’m making an investment.” 

“Knew I might find you here,” says Perkins, who he works with from time to time even though he doesn’t enjoy it. 

Marcus thinks, _shit_. Habits aren’t a good thing to have, all in all, because habits mean you get comfortable and sloppy. But that’s also how people find you for jobs and that’s how a guy’s got to eat. 

But more than that, it’s a little sad maybe, that interested parties know to find him at Denny’s rather than that infested fleapit of a jazz joint on Sunset. Or maybe it isn’t. Marcus likes what he likes. He does suffer less when he has to, and that’s what’s important. 

Mike looks like he wants to disappear into the melted dregs of his strawberry shake and John’s gaze is locked on Perkins’s tits like he’s got some sort of laser vision. 

Perkins lets him look. She is, by all rights, an attractive member of the female sex and knows it. From time to time, even Marcus thinks that, but he needs a little help. Mostly from a reliable guy called Jack Daniels. 

“...Bad time?” 

“Not really,” Marcus says. His cock kind of disagrees with him, but when a man thinks with his dick, he deserves to die. So. “These are my nephews.” Yeah, that’s him, on the way to wilting. 

“Your – nephews.” Perkins raises a heavily made-up brow. 

“We’re visiting Uncle Marcus from Portland,” John says grinning wide, and decidedly not nephew-like at all. “Hi.” 

Marcus resists the urge to choke on his next swallow of coffee. He reaches and settles an arm around her middle, squeezing Perkins near her hip where he knows that she’s got a tattoo of an infinity symbol low, practically scrawled over her skin. “What do you want?” 

“To borrow you,” she says, and looks at the watch on his wrist. “Nice bling.” 

Later, Perkins says, “...So where do your _nephews_ sleep, Marcus? In your car where you like, also fuck? Even for you, that’s.” 

Marcus rolls his eyes, and registers the watch on his wrist hitting the side of his steering wheel. “Shut up and tell me what the job is.” 

What the job is, is retrieving one fourteen-year-old Iosef Tarasov from an Armenian stronghold in Glendale where he’s got himself tangled up in a car boosting gone bad. This apparently has happened a couple of times, which is why it doesn’t take long to get the kid out of immediate trouble. Perkins knows the ropes. 

It’s in, and then out, easy. Mike and John are probably still sitting at Denny’s slopping up the rest of the fries and maybe in between them they can scrounge up enough change to buy another milkshake. 

Marcus still has no idea what Perkins is doing shacking up with Iosef’s old man Viggo, who serves subpar borscht at his restaurant in Studio City and also deals in more than subpar crystal cut with what might as well be dirt. But apparently Viggo’s got a line straight in to Copenhagen and he slings his wares using a certain sort of Russian whores, the ones with all their teeth and are smart or at least practical enough to shoot up between their toes. 

Come to think of it, Marcus has never paid particular attention to Perkins’s toes. Her boots look nice and new. Maybe she steps on Viggo with them the way Viggo’s wife, a mousy little Ukrainian thing who Marcus met once, won’t. 

Then there’s this awful retching sound in the backseat and all of Marcus’s dreams of hightailing it back to Denny’s, just shrivel up like a big puff of car exhaust. 

“Stop it,” Marcus reaches back and grabs a fistful of Iosef’s thatchy blond hair and the kid looks at him with glassy eyes. Stupid _and_ strung out. Great. “Stop –” The kid’s throat gurgles again in an inevitable way and Marcus nearly yanks him up to put him out of his goddamn misery. 

Perkins says, “I’m not helping you bury him if he chokes to death. But you can use Viggo’s car wash.”

Marcus checks the time and finds the glass face of the watch flecked with yellow bile. 

He doesn’t have much of a choice, so Marcus winds up in Studio City, where the guys in charge of Viggo Tarasov’s car wash don’t even bother to apologize. They just get to work. Marcus asks one of them for a clean cloth and they give him one. He puts the cloth to his nose and gets a strong whiff of fresh (if industrial) detergent. 

So Marcus sits down out outside in one of those rickety plastic chairs that the guys sit in when they come out for a smoke break. He lights up a cigarette for himself and breathes in. 

Perkins comes out from somewhere and plucks the cigarette out of his hand mid-inhale. She says, “Thanks,” the way she never does. 

“Do you want something else from me?” 

“Just felt bad about pulling you away from your nephews at Denny’s.” 

Marcus slips the watch off his wrist and breathes over the glass. He doesn’t want to admit to what they both already know. It wastes time. 

“Can I ask you a question?” 

Perkins blows a mouthful of smoke in his direction. “You can ask, sure.” 

“Why are you palling around with Viggo? Is it his dick? His drugs? I know it’s not his borscht.” 

“His borscht is okay, actually.” Perkins says, and her lips twist sideways and Marcus suddenly gets a feeling that they’re not having the same conversation. “If you’re into that sort of thing.” 

“Really not into borscht,”Marcus mutters to himself and returns his attention to the watch. 

“I just am,” Perkins says. “I’m not like you, Marcus. I don’t give a shit about his wife, or his damn kid, or whatever.” 

“Like I give a fuck about those things,” Marcus thinks about relieving his cigarette from her, but then decides it’s too much work. He shakes a fresh one from his pack and lights it, holding the cigarette in his mouth. Then he puts the watch back on and feels her gaze on its face. 

“What about that?” 

Marcus is suddenly conscious that she might try to roll him for it. It’d be in bad taste, but who knows with Perkins. 

“It’s for a job I have to do.” Marcus says. “What about it?” 

“I’d take it and skip town,” Perkins says, reaching to stub her cigarette in the ashtray nearly two-thirds full with used filters. “Why the fuck are you still here?” 

The truth is, Marcus has been trying to leave town for years. 

He usually gets as far as Santa Cruz, but then San Francisco does something funny to him and he always ends up back near the intersection of W. Continental’s Cash and Carry and then has to start all over again. It’s always north, never south. Or maybe it is Santa Cruz and he doesn’t want to admit it to himself. 

The whole of his car smells antiseptic, kind of like someone died. Thankfully, Marcus has only had someone kick it in his trunk once or twice. He rolls down the window, lets in the smog, telling and reliable, and then the smell fades away. 

He finds John outside of his motel room, poking what looks like leftover Dennys’ at the bum strewn across the doorway like some thing held together by not very good glue. 

“What took you so long?” 

“Careful, cupcake,” Marcus says. “I might think you miss me.” 

John straightens and drags his eyes up from the concrete, as if he is rearranging himself into something fit to be seen. “I don’t. So?” 

“I’ll do it,” Marcus looks him straight in the eye. “But you still owe me some skin, John.” 

“Skin,” John says and looks down at himself. “I’m nothing but skin and bone. C’mon.” 

It turns out that they do get to keep their room most of the time because John has a standing trade agreement with its manager, a man named Berrada. Trade agreement is what John calls it and doesn’t give any details. Details or no, Berrada gives Marcus the willies and that is saying something. 

“I take it that Mike doesn’t know about your arrangement?” 

John’s shoulders stiffen, and then he seems to reset himself again and jams a rusted key into the lock of a room on the second floor. “What are you, threatening me now?” 

“If I were threatening you, you’d know it.” Marcus says, reasonably, he thinks. “Since you gotta ask, no. Not a threat.” 

John throws a look over his shoulder and maybe, Marcus allows himself to think that the kid is at least a little bit impressed. Then the door to the motel room opens and John closes it quickly behind him. 

“No, Mikey doesn’t know,” John says. “I do this so he’ll always have a place to go. Mayor Favor has it in his grasp to move an entire city. The least I can do is move one fucker.”

Marcus reaches for the light switch beside the door and the lightbulbs have to think about it, but then they wake up and sputter to life. “Why not just take him with you?” 

“Would you go with a kid who wants you to top his old man?” John slumps down on the double bed and makes to kick off his shoes. 

“I would,” Marcus says. For the moment, he is simply content to stand against the door jamb, digging in, making it hurt, gathering his resolve. “I am. Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be.” 

John’s shoes come off, and so do his socks, gray-blue striped, notably without holes in them. It’s the first time Marcus has seen him undress when there is light, so of course he pays close attention. “Mike isn’t like you. Or me.” 

Mayor Jack Favor’s watch is suddenly heavy on his wrist, like the weight of the world. 

“We are nothing alike, John,” Marcus says. Suddenly, something like miasma rises up and replaces the oxygen that he ought to be breathing in. (Winston had once exclaimed the word as a crossword clue, it’d gotten stuck in Marcus’s brain like part of a broken spool yet to find its way. Miasma miasma, miasma.) 

Anyway, miasma fills his nose and Marcus is suddenly hungering for the cleanliness clinging to John, so he goes to the bed, where the kid is, and covers his hands. Maybe it’s just the room or the air, but maybe John’s hands are shaking. 

“I do this because I have no choice,” Marcus looks at him. “Odds are against me, yeah? Against me and your pal Mike. But you. You’re basically a fat pig fit for slaughter, John.” 

“You think that; you should have just disappeared with my old man’s watch,” John says. “That way, I get what I deserve.” 

_”Why the fuck are you still here?”_ Perkins’s admonishment is just about fresh in mind, and now it presses into his skin. Marcus doesn’t need to be here; but maybe he’s just told the kid the truth, the way he hadn’t really meant to. That he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to be.

“How would I know what you deserve?” Marcus says, and it’s like the miasma in his lungs has metastasized and spread to the very tips of his fingers, making the skin there itch. 

All he knows is that the kid is shaking, breaking, his for the taking, and maybe that’s enough.

It’s all Marcus could ever hope to get. 

He reaches to spread his fingers along the stubborn line of John’s jaw. Marcus presses his thumb against John’s thumb and the kid licks his skin. 

WIth his free hand, Marcus manages to tug John’s belt loose and then he slips a hand into John’s faded jeans, past his shorts and feels him skin and bone.

And blood.

John’s fingers grasp at Marcus’s hair and Marcus looks up. The way that John peers back at him with dark, hooded eyes is something. Something that imprints at the back of Marcus’s head even though he probably won’t ever have the words for it. 

“What are you doing?” 

The glass of Mayor Favor’s watch sidles up the length of John’s warming erection and Marcus just keeps looking at him. “I’m touching you.” 

John swallows. 

“Can you come here?” 

“Where?” 

John tugs him up, and Marcus follows the line of his grip. It comes easy, probably because John isn’t holding a gun to his temple. Marcus raises himself up on his knees, drawing in air that by all rights should belong to John, but it’s all shit. 

“Here,” John says and leans forward. An inch or two and then there is no more air. There is only spit and the taste of salt. On a boy’s mouth, which is even different from a woman’s. It takes Marcus by surprise, because he touches with his hands and eyes, never with his mouth. That means something else.

But John’s tongue is inviting no matter where it is, The way he sighs hotly into Marcus’s mouth and grabs at him as if he’s about to drown. Marcus knows better, knows better than to let himself get drawn into it, another con, but he can’t help himself. 

They are impossibly close, but it’s still there. The possibility of being even closer. Marcus has on his person, an envelope from Viggo Tarasov by way of Perkins, as a thank you for getting his kid out of Glendale. He hasn’t counted it. He probably should have. 

The bed, tired and fed up from other people, sinks beneath them. “Put your hands over your head. Up.” 

John’s eyes grow dark and resigned again. Marcus hates that he can see it, the change. But maybe he doesn’t, because that kind of detail saves his ass, over and over. Guy carrying a limp? Probably a badly-stuck knife near his ankle. Kid wanting to go somewhere? It means you got to make it hurt, leave him with nowhere to go. 

John sighs and obeys, clasping his hands over his head and something slips in his eyes, like he’s going somewhere. Somewhere else not here. Marcus lifts John’s shirt over his head and then John’s back again. 

“What are you doing now?” 

“Looking at you,” Marcus says. He has only seen John in the dark up until now and it’s easy to imagine the kid’s body as white as peaches-and-cream. The lighting here is hardly anything, just one step up from street lamps, lit to obscure rather than to illuminate, but it is only now, that Marcus comes face to face with John’s body in real life. 

The reality is that beneath John's clean clothes and his boyish demeanor, is that his body has been exposed to the elements (namely, other people). Some of the bruises look fresh. Others look old and faded. 

There is what looks like a cigarette burn just above John’s right elbow. Marcus passes his fingers over it and John winces. 

“Who did this to you?” 

John tries to look away, but Marcus doesn’t let him. He doesn’t give the kid a chance to go away. Marcus locks a hand around John’s throat but he doesn’t squeeze. He puts his fingers against John’s long jaw, its muscles usually tensed to form a sneer on his pretty mouth. 

But not now.

Jesus, the kid actually looks terrified of him, and John should be. But Marcus can’t now. He can’t even remember what he had in mind. 

“Don’t remember. Could be one guy. Could be ten.” John says. “This isn’t your first rodeo. You like hurting people too. C’mon, Marcus. I owe you flesh. I owe skin. So let’s just get this over with.” 

And that, should by all rights, get him up and going. Nothing comes this easy; maybe that’s why his luck is so shit most of the time, he can’t see a good thing when it comes to him because Marcus is so damn busy and so used to putting out fires that he can’t even fuck in peace. But Marcus can’t even feel his dick. Never mind it waking up. 

“Turn over. On your stomach.” 

John does. There’s a long scratch parallel to his spine, and Marcus imagines himself licking it, dragging glass against it. He moves to tug down John’s jeans and his shorts, finding the kid’s ass remarkably free of bruises. Marcus tries not to think about how he is relieved. He gets up from the bed and feels John’s gaze sharp on his back. 

“Where are you going?” 

“I’ll be right back.” 

Marcus heads into the adjoining bathroom and notes that it hasn’t been cleaned. There’s a pubic hair clinging to the side of the sink. 

Rooting around, Marcus finds a bottle of what looks like lotion with stuff still in it. Smells okay, even if the bottle is sticky. He runs it under the tap. 

Then he gets back to John on the bed to find the kid still on his stomach, but stark naked. Marcus squeezes a bit of the smooth creamy stuff on his fingers and touches John between the thighs. He finds another mark, this one dark and blue. He feels John stiffen under his fingers. 

“...What’s that?”

“Something I found. I won’t hurt you.” 

John laughs. The sound is cutting and old and opens up some of the old marks on Marcus’s own body. “Don’t believe you.” 

“I won’t, anyway. Whether or not you believe me doesn’t matter.” 

John twists his head back to look at him. “Anyone ever say that to you? That they won’t hurt you? Did you believe them?” 

“Nobody’s ever said that to me,” Marcus says. “So you’re a lucky bastard, I guess. Turn around.” 

John does. Marcus puts two fingers against him and holds them there without pressing in. Then he does, and the kid is warm and tight and even unspoiled by a guy or ten, and if Marcus closes his eyes, he can go back to dreaming about peaches and cream. He moves slow, mindful, feeling the certain clench of the kid he thinks to himself he can do this all day. At least, for hours. He can do this for hours. 

“Oh,” John groans finally after a little bit, a long moment, and pushes back into the intrusion. That sound, that’s what wakes up Marcus’s dick to give it feeling. To flood it with blood and he bites back a sound of his own. 

Marcus leans forward, burying his nose into the kid’s ink, he licks at _Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat_ , praying that it will make him lucky. The bed is starting to creak, as John ruts into the mattress. 

“Stop that.” 

John does, but not right away. He turns to look again his eyes are black with want. “Then what do you...” 

“Undress me.” 

John makes another sound when Marcus takes his fingers out of him. They unfold, lazy and then upright, with John holding Marcus in place with his hands and then his mouth. They kiss again, like a girl kisses a boy in movies but this isn’t that. It’s still nice; he can think that, as long as he doesn’t say it out loud. Marcus feels it, John looking over his marks, too. His bruises that have given up on healing but he doesn’t have any cigarette burns. 

The kid takes a hold of his dick and moves to slide down to his knees but Marcus says, looking up towards the ceiling. “No. Not that.” 

“Then what?” 

“Come here,” Marcus parks himself at the edge of the bed. Legs spread, impossibly hard. His fingers tingle with the memory of how tight John is and his dick aches for it like it has never ached for any damn thing. “Sit.” 

John comes to him and touches his mouth. Marcus sucks him down to his unblemished knuckles and then drinks in John’s moan when he lowers himself down. “Marcus. _Fuck_.” 

“Go slow,” Marcus whispers like he’s not himself. He isn’t really. He’s somebody else. He’s long ceased to be someone who is hungry for this sort of thing, this softness that is all over John’s body because. Because. Marcus can’t remember why. 

Sometime during the night, Marcus wakes up hard. He reaches John for again, who is there like he would have been, in Marcus’s head. This time, Marcus fucks him quick and hard and John’s little cries of _please fuck me_ fills the air and makes where they are someplace else.


	3. Someplace Else

Marcus wakes up; it’s morning, and the room stinks. Stinks from fucking and the fact that the room stinks in general. 

John is still asleep and the way he curls his hand against Marcus’s hip makes him not want to disturb the kid. But that’s the thing about cons. They end. And besides, Marcus has to get into the mindset of driving north, and also to kill the Mayor of Portland. These are big tasks when his brain is still pulling south. 

John tightens his grip and Marcus thinks about fucking him again. His cock is up for it. His cock is also possibly delusional; it does that from time to time. 

“Let go,” Marcus touches John’s wrist. And slowly the kid comes awake.

“Where are you going?” 

“For some breakfast,” Marcus says. He has to poke around on the floor before he finds what he is looking for. His shirt, his shorts, his socks. He feels the kid staring at him and practicality takes over so no red makes it to his face. “Come with me, if you want.” 

John blinks. Then he stretches, slow and catlike and begins to get dressed. “I guess I’m famished, yeah.” 

At the notion of John’s being “famished,” Marcus is suddenly very aware that his cock wants to do something with that. Hell, that’d make a crossword clue, six-across. Big words make him horny. Rhymes with regular shyster but also maybe not. 

“What?” John is suddenly very close to him and Marcus consciously steps away from the kid. 

Too late. 

“I can famished for something else, too,” John says and reaches for Marcus’s belt to find Marcus’s traitorous dick. What the hell, it’s probably too early for breakfast anyway. 

They end up at Denny’s again, where a different waitress looks marginally less pissed off at Marcus’s request for free coffee refills because John asks for The Grand Slam and an ice cream sundae, and two onion rings, some hash browns, and extra fries, and. 

“And that’s it,” Marcus says, skimming the top of his coffee, which is hot and bitter. “Thanks, sweetie.” 

The waitress goes and they both stare after her. Marcus’s mouth itches for a cigarette. “You’re not gonna eat all that.” 

John says, “Some of it’s for Mike.” 

“Sure,” Marcus stands. “I need a smoke.” 

The city of Los Angeles never sleeps, but it can get very drunk and not move around for a while. Today is that; not a soul around, not yet. Marcus leans against his car and lights up. The nicotine suffuses his lungs and he feels better. 

He looks down at his hands and imagines himself putting his fingers against the bump of Jack Favor’s throat and then doing away with him. No frills, no fuss. No pussying out, most of all. 

Marcus stamps out his cigarette and goes back inside, where he finds John dipping his onion rings into chocolate ice cream with kiddish gusto. 

“What,” Marcus starts and then decides against asking. He drinks more coffee and looks at the kid eat. He likes watching the kid eat. 

John polishes off the onion rings and picks at the fried bits sitting on top of the ice cream with his fingers. Marcus tries not to look then, and turns his attention to the parking lot instead. He says, “Why?” 

“Why what?” John says. 

“It can’t be just about the money,” Marcus says. “And it’s not because you feel like it. That’s too easy.” 

“Everything’s about money,” John shoves a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. “And I do feel like it. Don’t you feel like it?” 

“If I felt like it, I’d do it myself.” 

“So why don’t you?” 

“You don’t get to do that,” Marcus says. “You don’t fucking –” 

John spears a sausage, over-soaked in oil and bites savagely into it, in a way that would make a lesser man cower and shrink into himself. “You’ve done it before, yeah?” 

Marcus flashes back to the bodies left in the house in Burbank. What’s funny is how he doesn’t remember it so much, outside the fact that he must have done it. He never does. John doesn’t seem to want to eat the eggs, so Marcus helps himself to one. At the same time, he watches the waitress. She’s bent cooing over a baby in a high chair. Which means she’s unlikely wander over and ask if he wants more coffee. The fact that Marcus is due more coffee has very little to do with anything. 

“Yeah,” Marcus says. “I have.” 

“Did you like it?” 

“I’d be a creepy fucker if I liked it,” Marcus tells him, and tells himself that it must be true. 

“You mean, when you’re not too busy being one already. Or my uncle.” 

“You really going to hold that against me.” Marcus says. 

“Maybe,” John shrugs. “She buy it?” 

“Don’t think so.” And really, Marcus doesn’t want to think about it. 

If Marcus is really honest, what he really wants to do is go back to that godforsaken motel room, stick his fingers and tongue and maybe his dick too back into John and forget about the world for a while. And he is honest, just for a hot second. 

But Marcus can’t do that, probably can’t afford to. So when John follows him back to his car slinging a bag dripping grease from the leftovers, he says, “Can you find your own way back?” 

“Probably,” John says, eyeing the empty block. “But I don’t wanna.” 

“You’re going to have to,” Marcus tells him. “I got somewhere to be.” 

“So I’ll come with you,” John says.

“Thought you want to give Mike his breakfast,” Marcus gestures at the bag. 

John looks at the bag and shrugs. “It doesn’t matter if it gets cold. If I don’t bring him this, he wouldn’t have anything to eat. He’ll wait.”

Marcus sighs; he forces himself to consider that having John along is not altogether a terrible idea. It might get him in and out faster and, there is that small part of him that _wants_ John to see that “half of whatever” is worth more than the words that had so easily left his mouth, as if the kid doesn’t know what it means. Marcus has half a mind to think he still doesn’t. “You get any grease on the seat and you’re dead meat, you hear?” 

John nods, “Yes, sir.” 

Marcus gets to W. Continental’s Cash and Carry in record time and finds Winston just opening up. It’s an intricate job, with the man removing various lockboxes and putting various rings, watches, and a few other odds and ends and putting them on display, including an emerald brooch that Marcus remembers relieving from someplace not so long ago. 

Come to think of it, Marcus has never seen Winston sell anything properly. But his wares change with regular certainty and after putting a lockbox back into its rightful place, he goes and consults his crossword rolled up by the register. 

“What the hell is he doing?” John is close enough that Marcus can still smell meat on his breath. Meat mixed in with grease. 

“I don’t really question it,” Marcus says. He raises a hand to hit the glass, thick and bulletproof. “Open up!” 

Winston looks up, startled, and Marcus thinks for a moment that the old fossil is about to pull a gun, but then he doesn’t. He does, however, fold up his crossword and stride to the entrance of his fine establishment looking annoyed. “...It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Unless you’re prepared to sell me that watch, I’m closed for business.” 

“The watch isn’t for sale,” says John, before Marcus can tell him keep his mouth shut.

“Oh?” Winston’s irritation slips away then into something more congenial. It looks forced, like his face doesn’t really do friendly. This is not surprising in the least. “Aren’t you all that and a bag of chips.” 

“Leave him alone,” Marcus says. “I need something. An appointment with your guy.” 

“Which one?” 

Marcus rolls his eyes. He’s only ever asked for appointments with one guy in particular, but maybe it’s Winston’s way of telling him that the big leagues have no place for a guy like Marcus if he can’t even say a word right. “I would like to see the,” he clears his throat. “Sommelier.” He thinks he gets it right. After all, Winston really gets all up in his grill if he doesn’t. “Yeah, him.” 

Winston looks disappointed about not getting to ream him one and Marcus still wants to punch him in the face. 

“Why are you going to buy booze?” John says. 

“I’m not gonna go,” Marcus starts and then he realizes that Winston has unchained the two locks securing the door. Okay, this works too. “Not buying booze. Can you shut up?” 

“He’s a tonic,” Winston offers by the way of an explanation; he closed the door behind them again and chained it before wandering back to the register. “Now if you can feed me the answer to eighteen down, then I’ll concede to Marcus knowing sterling company when he sees it. I can’t seem to figure it for myself.” 

“All right then,” John says, squaring himself up. Marcus has to tell himself that the kid’s got good instincts. He can handle his own shit. “Let’s hear it.” 

“It is,” Winston makes a show of peering at his paper. “A neighbor whose house is on fire. Eight letters. G’s the third to the last letter, I believe.” 

John thinks, and then he brightens. “I know it.” 

“That is not a word,” Marcus says. “Christ’s sake.” 

“Yes it is,” John looks at him. “I had a Greek maid. Can’t say it though. D’you want me to write it down?” 

The price of entry is _Ucalegon_. Marcus still holds that it isn’t a word, but it fits in Winston’s crossword like a barrel of a shotgun shoved against someone’s teeth. Impossible to ignore or deny. 

John’s response, warded by a boyish shrug: “Athena told me a lot of funny words. I don’t remember them all. Can he have his appointment now?” 

“WIth a mind and a mouth like that, dear boy, you can have anything you want,” Winston smiles like an edge of a serrated knife. “I need to make a phone call.” 

“...You had a Greek maid,” Marcus says once they’re en route to an address in Inglewood. The city has since woken up so it’s looking like it is going to take a while. 

“Jealous?” John says. He still has the bag of Denny’s leftovers in his lap and tangles his fingers up in the cheap plastic. 

“Maybe a little,” Marcus admits. “Did you bang her?” 

“I wanted to,” John doesn’t look at him. “But no. Dad got to her first. I don’t go in for that sort of thing. And then she disappeared one day. Probably got knocked up.” 

“Or she’s dead,” Marcus says. Because to him somebody disappearing means that somebody’s dead. It’s neater that way. 

“I hope not,” John says. “I liked her.” Then he reaches for Marcus’s hand settled over the console, and then he seems to change his mind and just brushes over the face of his father’s watch still on Marcus’s wrist. “Is that what happened to him?” 

“Him who?” 

“Your old man. Is he dead?” 

Marcus opens his mouth and draws in a full draft of bad air. He finally lets it out and notes that it all tastes the same, in the end. “He’s no longer a menace to society.” 

“So he’s...locked up,” John says. 

“Yeah.” Now it’s Marcus’s turn to keep his eyes on the road. “I’ll end up there too, just give me some time.” 

“It sounds like a party,” John agrees. “Can I bum a cigarette?” 

When Marcus and John finally get to Inglewood, it’s nearly noon. Maybe the Gods of Favor do favor Jack Favor and they’ll never leave town. Again. Usually, Marcus doesn’t come to this part of town and often and all of the road detours are doing his head in. 

“The Sommelier isn’t like Winston, all right?” Marcus stalls the car and stares pins and needles at the kid. “Keep your mouth shut and your stories about your _Greek maid_ , to yourself. Capeesh?” 

The Sommelier is a guy who Winston knows from somewhere. Probably somewhere also out of the scope of Marcus’s imagination like Europe like John’s Greek maid. Whatever the case, the guy has been around a while but he also speaks funny. He also has a penchant for moving around, sometimes it’s Chinatown, sometimes Century City; this is the first time that the Sommelier has moved so far down south and Marcus wonders if the guy is in some kind of trouble, too. 

“You’re late,” says the Sommelier. “Winston said half ten.” 

“Winston doesn’t leave his cash register or his crossword and has no concept of the traffic flow in Los Angeles. And besides, with that jam on Centinela?” Marcus takes out the fat envelope from Viggo Tarasov and nearly can’t bear to part with it. But he tosses it towards the Sommelier and the other man takes a passing glance at its contents. 

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you so fat,” says the Sommelier. “Would you like to sample the latest Beaujolais?” 

“What year is it?” John says, and Marcus resists the urge to knock the kid soundly over the head. 

“Who’s he?” 

“He’s,” Marcus twists his mouth.

“Just a crazy motherfucker.” John says. 

The Sommelier takes them through a variety of firearms, except he keeps calling them something else. A Glock becomes a hearty Grenache with a reliable body, and a Browning becomes a Muscat, sweet and sure to the touch. The big boys are whiskeys but not whiskeys that Marcus has ever heard of, even though the Glenfiddich is tempting, In actuality, the Glenfiddich is a custom sawn-off shotgun with a wide, if short-range spray and with that, Mayor Jack Favor could really end up all over his own living room wall. 

“So I can’t have a glass of Beaujolais?” John says and Marcus weighs the Glock in his hand. He flips it around and feels the barrel in his grip, much like the metal snug around his wrist. 

“I might have some cognac,” says the Sommelier agreeably. “If that is to your taste.” 

“Is that what you’re calling a crossbow?” 

“Now, that’s an idea.” The Sommelier looks between them. “Don’t break anything. I’ll take this for insurance.” He tucks the fat envelope under his arm and goes. 

John says, staring after the guy. “Does he do that all the time?”

“All the time,” Marcus says, gearing up for it, a big score. “He says it’s for plausible deniability. Know what that is?” 

“Course I do,” John says. 

Then Marcus just clocks him one good with the butt of the gun. Upside the jaw, but not hard enough to crack teeth. He makes it count. It’ll bruise, and it’ll hurt, but Marcus thinks he’s kept his word. John stumbles because he’s winded, but he’ll get up again. He’s not hurt the kid. Not that way. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” John grits out. “What the _fuck_ , Marcus. You know I gotta –” 

“Or you don’t got to suck any more dick once I do what you ask,” Marcus says, reasonably, he thought. “Stay down. This thing is loaded. Safety’s off, too.” 

John is halfway through picking himself up, but then he thinks better of it and stays put. He breathes noisily and unevenly. “What do you want now? I’ve given you skin.” 

“I just want to know why. If I get jammed up for this, I want to know it’s worth it.” And that must really be the truth because. Any sane guy wouldn’t be like this, doing what Marcus is doing now; they’d just do the job, take half of whatever, or even a third or a quarter, because when it comes down to it, guys like Marcus aren’t too hot with numbers and just take what they can get. 

But Marcus gets a feeling that this is all different. John, the job, the score. It sits like a disagreeable stone in his gut. 

“All right,” John says after the longest minute. “All right. I’m going to take something out of my pocket, okay? Just – just don’t shoot, okay?” 

Marcus holds his aim steady, but he does cock the safety back on. “Okay.” 

“I ran away because I found these,” John says sticking a bunch of folded polaroids in Marcus’s direction, but pointedly away from his gun. “He’s been _doing_ that to people.” 

Marcus unfolds one, and then another. “Fuck. Even I wouldn’t…” He trails off. Maybe it’s better not to admit that sort of thing, even as an attempt towards solidarity. He looks down at John again. “You carry around those pictures and you still.” 

John just looks at him. “He’s never done it to me, lucky I don’t have girly tits.” Then he breaks the gaze and stares at the floor instead. “You should see all the fucking fat cats he took money from. Maybe he did this to fit in with the old boys. He was a good old man, my dad. And you know, I’m not him.” 

“Jesus.” 

The Sommelier reappears from somewhere, holding the envelope and just one glass filled halfway with something orange-red like wood varnish. Marcus doesn’t exactly go in for that sort of thing. He prefers Jack’s, straightforward and no-nonsense and

Cheap.

“Here you are,” the Sommelier says. 

“I think Marcus needs it more than me,” John says, like some smug little worm. 

“I’m driving,” Marcus says. “I can’t.” It’s not that he respects the law. Obviously, he doesn’t, but he cares about his car. Like, he really gives a fuck about the state of his wheels because Marcus is going to get out of Los Angeles today. 

The Sommelier gives him a look. “It will calm your nerves.” 

“I don’t fucking _have_ any nerves. Thanks.” 

Neither John nor the Sommelier look like they believe him. Marcus flexes his fingers, and tries to believe it himself. The Sommelier shoves the drink in his hand and it’s a lot like drinking wood polish. But a drink is still a drink. He gulps it down and doesn’t feel better. 

But the good thing about any old huckster, the Sommelier included, means that they only care about one thing. How green your money is. As long as you can pay up, then it’s no questions asked. 

And Marcus’s money is green as anyone’s on God’s green earth. 

The crawl back to Los Angeles is slow as molasses. This is what always happens; Marcus makes his mind up to get out of town and then the city keeps getting bigger and won’t let him out. 

But finally it happens, and it hurts Marcus’s rib cage and some other bits of him that he usually had cause to think about only when someone was whaling him one good in some blind alley. It’s only happened a couple of times, but it’s a hard thing to forget. Anyway, he shouldn’t be hurting like that just watching Mike eat greasy cold leftovers from Denny’s. 

Hell, maybe he likes watching Mike eat too. But Marcus’s mouth now itches for something worse than a cigarette. Jack Favor’s watch tells him that it’s nearly two in the afternoon and it’s probably a day to Portland, if Marcus can manage to make it past Santa Cruz. 

“Hey,” he says to John. “I want to get moving.” 

“Okay,” John nods. 

Mike says, with his mouth full of stale hash browns. “Where are you going?” 

Marcus suddenly doesn’t want to be here. He makes a beeline for the door but John is quicker than he is. Marcus feels a weight clamp around his wrist, just above the watch. 

“We’re going to Portland,” John says. 

“I’m coming with,” Mike swallows and swipes across his mouth with the back of his hand. 

“No,” John says. “You’re not. You’re going to be in the way.” 

“But,” Mike bites his lip. “You _promised_ me you wouldn’t do this, John. That you wouldn’t leave –” 

Marcus really doesn’t want to be here for this. He wrenchis his arm out of John’s grasp. “I’m going outside.”

But even when he gets outside, he still hurts all over. The cigarette he tries to light won’t, and at some point Marcus gives up and just sits in the car with the engine turned off smelling old food grease from fucking Denny’s. 

Finally, John reappears, and he gets in the car, and doesn’t say anything. 

“Will he stay?” Marcus says. 

“Yeah,” John sighs. “Even if I’ve told him to go someplace else. I gave him what I had, you know. Been saving up.” 

Marcus gets out the envelope from Viggo Tarasov and flits his fingers through the bills. “He won’t even leave to buy a milkshake?” 

John fixes him with a steady look. “That’s too weird, man." 

“Yeah, maybe it is,” Marcus shrugged and traded the envelope for his pack of smokes. “Here, kid. You look like you need one.” 

It’s a familiar feeling once a sign on the Interstate 5 announces Santa Cruz. The fact that Marcus knows it’s coming doesn’t make it any easier to swallow and in fact, he doesn’t swallow at all. It’s a very near thing, as he veers his car into the next rest stop, and breathes heavily like a chick who wants to cry and look pretty on a date. 

But of course, it’s not that. 

Marcus feels a hand pressing into his shoulder blades, neither kind nor anything else. “Don’t touch me.” 

“There’s nobody else around,” John says. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” 

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” Marcus snaps. “I just need –” 

Marcus is faintly aware of John reaching for something inside his jacket. Might be the Glock, and it’d serve Marcus right to be such a stupid fucker for a stupid pretty face, that it would end up leaving him for dead in the place where he least fucking wanted to die. 

But then it’s just his smokes, and Marcus hears the telling click of a lighter rather than a trigger. Then John bends to stick the cigarette in his mouth. 

“Here.” 

After a moment, when Marcus is sure that the nicotine had done its work flooding through his lungs, he opens his mouth again. “I’ve never managed to make it past here.” It's true, but it also doesn't make any sense. It's right up there with Los Angeles growing bigger day by day. 

“Okay,” John says. “Why?” 

“My old man’s locked up in Santa Cruz. It just don’t feel right.” Marcus says, “It’s kind of like those pictures you got. Except mine’s a stretch of interstate and an entire fucking city.” 

“Have you,” John starts and then bites at his bottom lip. It’s plush and full and Marcus needs a distraction, any distraction. So he tries to remember how the kid’s mouth is very good at wrapping around his dick. “Ever told him to go fuck himself?” 

“What?” 

“I say that to the damn pictures. I say, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” 

Marcus closes his eyes. “I’ve never been to see him. No.” 

“Maybe you should. We’ve got time.” 

There is something surreal (another crossword answer, but Marcus has long forgotten the clue) about carrying what he knows into even a medium security prison. The Glock is snug in the glove box and John lends him a shirt with a collar that makes Marcus apparently look halfway presentable instead of just immediately crooked. Kid’s got a discerning eye, maybe. 

“Who do you want to see?” 

The name sticks in his throat. Marcus has to cough several times to unstick it and tells himself it’s the cigarette from earlier. 

“Peter Van Houten. He’s serving twenty to life.” 

“And you’re, who? Let’s see some ID.” 

John, somewhere behind him, is suddenly vibrating with attention. Marcus can feel it. He sighs and gets out his billfold, manages to find what he is looking for after going through expired restaurant coupons (not all of them from Denny’s.) “This is me. I know it’s expired.” 

The guy looks at it from behind his glass, distinctly unimpressed. He clicks a few keys on his computer and makes a noise. “You can’t see him.” 

“They move him somewhere?” 

“No,” the guard actually looks a bit sorry for him here and that’s not something that Marcus is too used to, either. “Peter Van Houten is dead. There was an altercation in the yard a few months back. We did try to find you. But we didn’t even have an address.” 

Marcus doesn’t know if he feels better or worse. 

Or maybe he doesn’t feel anything. He would have just mindlessly driven through the mess that was San Francisco if John hadn’t said he’d wanted something to eat. And Marcus doesn’t have to listen to the kid. But he does, so they end up at some late night pizza place where John eats a slice of double pepperoni, extra cheese while guzzling a large coke. 

Out of deference for Mike maybe, John doesn’t order a milkshake. 

“Say something,” John says. 

“You got sauce on your face,” Marcus intones flatly and hands over some napkins. 

“That’s not what I mean.” 

What does the kid know, anyway? He’s just a hustler with a Greek maid who insists that he isn’t anything that he clearly is. His old man is a good man, but John wants him dead. Marcus isn’t his dead old man but he is. Not to mention the fucking, but that’s not far from Marcus’s head, either. 

“You’re not going to ask me what my name is?” Marcus says. 

“Would you tell me?” 

Marcus gets out his expired ID from his wallet. The only thing recognizable about the old faded photograph is that the teenager is still angry and that’s not the kind of anger that leaves a person. It leaks everywhere and it stinks like hell, but it never leaves. 

John takes it and turns it over and over in his hands. Then he laughs, “Is that your _real name_? It’s like. Someone wrote it, in a book. Like a real person shouldn’t have it.”

“All right, all right, easy,” Marcus snatches it back. Once it’s safe back in his billfold, safe, secret, nonexistent, he feels better. “But you know, I haven’t felt like a real person. Not for a real long time.” 

Later, in some motel room, John licks a line from the tip of Marcus’s cock down to his balls and then a little too near his asshole for comfort. He forgives it the first time, because he thinks to himself (not that he is really thinking all that much) that it is an accident. Then John does it a second time and yeah, definitely not an accident. 

“The fuck are you doing?” 

John raises himself up and settles his chin on top of Marcus’s knee. “Checking if you feel real. You do feel real, Marcus.” 

“If you know that, then stop checking.” But Marcus’s voice thins at that, because John starts moving again, dragging his mouth and its inviting wet heat against the inside of Marcus’s thigh and.

“Oh, fuck.” 

John pushes into him, keeping a tight grip on his cock and Marcus makes a sound. A sound that stretches everything that he is and makes him something else. Then John moves again and Marcus forces himself to look as the whole of John’s face fills his vision. 

“I’m not going to hurt you, either,” John says. “It’s okay. Feel it, Marcus. How fucking it real it is.” 

The next morning, they’re slow moving, and Marcus hurts. But maybe he hurts in a good way. They get breakfast to go at a drive-through and they share a large soda that’s mostly ice. Two straws. John smiles pretty and probably makes a girl’s day. 

Portland comes into view, and John doesn’t say anything. 

His radio has been broken for a long time. It’s not something that usually bothers Marcus, but now he wishes that he’s got some way to fill the silence with noise. 

“You going to say that to him, or what?” 

“Hm?” John says. 

“You know, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you for making me do this.” 

“With the gun, isn’t that kind of redundant? A bullet’s pretty fuck you, isn’t it?” 

Marcus finds that he can’t really argue with this and asks John to light up a cigarette.

John supposedly lives, in the biggest house that Marcus has ever fucking seen. It’s even got a goddamn pool and apparently that’s where the spare key is, in the pool house. The lawn looks so green it’s practically the color of nuclear energy.

“Or maybe he moved it.” John said, “The fucker.” 

It’s early evening, which means they’ve picked a real bad time for this, whatever this will end up being. People will get home from work (which Marcus only clocks on to because that’s what makes a good B&E, to have a great sense of timing). And now Marcus’s even got a watch. 

“I’ve got a crowbar in my trunk,” he offers finally. “It might look funny if you used a key.” 

John looks annoyed. “Why didn’t you say?” 

“Figure you might want to show off.” Marcus says, “Let me go get it. Hold my gun.” 

“Why?” 

“In case anyone comes out. You had a Greek maid, yeah? How do you know there’s not, anyone else?” 

John hesitates, “I just.” 

Then Marcus gets it and he thinks to himself _Christ on a bike_. “You’ve never held a gun. Look. Grip, trigger, safety on, safety off. Aim, and boom he’s dead.” 

John takes the gun and puts it straight against Marcus’s temple. “And boom, he’s dead.” 

“Attaboy,” Marcus says, and claps the kid on the shoulder for a second too long. They both know it, but obviously it’s not something that needs talking about. 

Marcus is a little rusty with a crowbar and he makes a lot of noise. But the house is so big and there really doesn’t seem to anyone home. But then they both hear a dull drone of a newscast from somewhere, something about a crime uptick in upscale neighborhoods. 

In the end, Mayor John Favor dies by a round of seven fuck you bullets and Marcus is only a little sorry about shooting up the guy’s nice TV. He might have been able to hawk that to Winston for a pretty penny. 

“I gotta go look for that spare key,” John says. “Or else they're gonna. It’s around somewhere.” 

“And I’ve got to go,” in a couple hours, the body would start to smell. If there’s anything that Marcus hates more than the filthy old car sex smell that he suddenly can’t wait to get back to because at least it’s the sort of shit he understands – it’s the rancid smell of a body. 

“Hang on a sec,” John says. Marcus is left staring at the Mayor’s body. Then John comes back and presses a piece of paper into his hand. “This is an account number in the Caymans.” 

“Where’s that?” 

“Not here,” John smiles. “Someplace else. Now you can get the hell out.” 

“And you,” Marcus says. “Where’re you gonna be, John? Stuck here in this big house?” He very nearly says something else, but he doesn't. But maybe John knows that he wants to. 

The kid just shrugs. “You should go now, Marcus. Keep the watch. I might come looking for it one day.” 

On the way back down south, Marcus speeds past Santa Cruz doing eighty-five and forgets the city exists. The late Mayor’s watch tells him he’s making great time. 

The door to Mike’s motel room is unlocked when Marcus tries the handle. He finds MIke in the room, unmoving. Marcus shakes him, and Mike’s body slowly moves, groaning awake. 

“What are you doing here?” Mike says, blinking brightly at him. 

“Thought you might want to get out of here, Mike,” Marcus says. “We’ll go someplace else. What do you say?” 

Mike takes a minute and nods. “I say yeah.” He reaches for a shirt on the floor and begins to get dressed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I...still have no idea why I wrote this. I hope someone enjoyed the ride :). Honestly, this started out because I wanted Marcus to say "nice bling" and go to Denny's. I'm going to go back to writing saner things now. 
> 
> Fun fact: Ucalegon is indeed a Greek word that means "neighbor whose house is on fire." It featured twice on the NYT crossword in the 1960s. So uh, some creative license there. 
> 
> Also, Denny's 1994 commercial for The Grand Slam breakfast is here for additional nineties flavor. I was trying to look for a menu from 90s. I found one but didn't want to bid $$$ for it on Ebay. Now regretting it immensely.


End file.
